Payroll System Using C++ Assignment

CO1409 Payroll System Using C++

Introduction

The idea of developing a payroll system is to enter employee’s hours worked and remuneration per hour to have the computer generate the wages. Besides assessing the overall remuneration, the system also provides for the income tax which in its computation results in the actual pay less tax. This is crucial for an organization since it cuts on costs by avoiding errors that would result in extra hours spent on payrolls while at the same time maintaining compliance to taxation laws. By doing so, it will reduce the time and cost required to perform the tasks, while greatly enhancing accuracy for employee remunerations. It should be able to support several employee records, compute the pre and post tax monthly salary, and read the data from files in order to fulfill the need of the payroll process. The features include features such as generating multiple pay files for different months, which may be incorporated in the future, and incorporating error management mechanisms that would increase the reliability of the payroll data. The requirements it would devise entail reading the employee data, computation of wages, applying tax deductions, and managing errors in the payroll files. The application has to include the ability to read fields from the employee detail and pay files, perform a series of processes and then be able to display the resultant data for each employee. It has been designed to meet such requirements with the employment of hard coded data for the initial tests. Initially it determines basic earnings from gross, which in combination with hours worked and hourly wage as well as deductions with the help of co-efficient using the certain exemption level and tax rate. In addition to the items mentioned above, the system can be applied to read data from other files, check the legitimacy of inputs and process several files related to the payroll, which will enhance both performance and usability. Students also benefit from this project in the way that they get to apply what they have learnt in programming, problem solving as well as getting an insight of how to approach software design most efficiently.

Objectives

• To automate the calculation of employee wages.
• To handle tax deductions based on income levels.
• To manage employee data efficiently.
• To ensure error-free data processing.

System Design and Approach

Design Considerations

The present structure as a payroll system should be efficient as well as follow a modular approach and flexibility. This employment details and their hourly work are stored in the use of an unordered_map data structure. This has been done intentionally due to the requirement of efficient and faster look up times and more so when handling large data concerning the employees. The use of the unordered_map for storing the records of the employees makes the insertion and look up operations to be of constant time complexity, so the access to the records of the employees can be done quickly, by knowing the unique identification number of the employee. This is very appropriate in storing and accessing employees’ names, their wages per hour, and number of hours worked per a particular month (Irvandi, 2024). It is also important to note that the data structure also helps in scalability in that if the establishment has a large number of employees this can be easily adjusted. The design of the system is function based in an attempt to include the concept of modularity in its design. The functions for calculating the payroll include getEmployeeDetails(), getHoursWorked(), calculateMonthlyPay() and displayPayroll(). Know about the purpose of these functions, getEmployeeDetails() II loads the data of the employees, getHoursWorked() gets the number of hours that an employee has worked in the month, calculateMonthlyPay() computes the employee pay based on the number of hours in a week and the rate per hour as well as deductions, if any, and displayPayroll() displays the information in an easy to read format. All such modularization has benefits such as ease of maintenance and debugging of the code.

Input Handling and Tax Calculation

The system is coded for its testing, and they have provided the information of the employees and the hours worked with a fixed value in the code. Although which makes it easier for initial development, the following features could substitute all the data set values by files for flexibility of updating its values in additional upcoming versions (Hung and Alduais, 2024). Tax is calculated with respect to his income level of an employee and to achieve this the gross income for the month is multiplied by 12 to get the gross income per annum. The personal allowance or more commonly known as tax free amount is £ 12,570, and the total income is then less the exemption to get the taxable income. The remaining taxable income is then subjected to 20% tax and then the monthly tax deductions will be arrived at by dividing the annual tax by 12. This will be useful to meet minimum standards required for any taxation policy.

Figure 1: Input Handling and Tax Calculation

(Source: Self-created )

Code Implementation

Code Structure

The structure and design of the programme are logical, and are established by dividing the means of payroll into even more functions. It leads to better control of the employees’ information and the ways of calculating and exhibiting their payments. The program is made as modular and scalable as much as possible to adhere to the paradigms of C++ programming language and using unordered_map for storing and accessing data. This also makes the payroll system easy to expand or transform in the future like the future change of the tax rates, the inclusion of new aspects of pay roll or complexity in the calculations (Borade et al, 2022). There are four primary functions of the system, namely getEmployeeDetails(), getHoursWorked(), calculateMonthlyPay() and the displayPayroll(). Each of the described functions has its own purpose in the execution of the whole program and in structuring of the code. The getEmployeeDetails() function entails the process of capturing the details of each employee such as employee identification number, name as well as the hourly rate of pay. The function utilizes the unordered_map that takes an integer as an argument and an unordered_map that has the integer as key and a struct Employee that has the name of the employee and the hourly rate as value. Therefore, the unordered_map is suitable for this assignment because it also has constant complexity for insertion and search operations, which is optimal for big data. In addition, because unordered_map is an unordered collection of key-value pairs, it verifies the lookup operations, and it is possible to access employee data quickly by invoking their ID (Atim et al, 2023). The program moves to the getHoursWorked() function after obtaining employee data. The program uses this function to acquire employee work hour data from each person for the current month. The method employs an unordered_map to store employee working hours just like getEmployeeDetails() but assigns employee IDs as keys and working time values as elements. The function operates with parameterized month entry to guarantee payroll system flexibility for handling various monthly data seamlessly. Program scalability becomes possible because the system allows addition of new months without affecting the core codebase. The program establishes proper input data validation through cin for integer and floating-point data types and getline() for employee names that include space characters. The function resolves possible input buffering problems by implementing cin.ignore() which results in proper processing of user inputs (Breugnot et al. 2021). The program proceeds to payroll computation after obtaining employee work hours. The calculateMonthlyPay() function computes both the gross and net pay for each employee. The formula for gross pay computation requires multiplication of the hourly wage with total worked hours. The computation determines the yearly earnings through gross pay multiplication by 12. The programming uses annual income to perform its income tax assessment. Each individual pays no tax for their earnings below specific limits under the simple taxation system (Thorne, 2023). A person must complete tax payments at a rate of 20% on all earnings that surpass the tax threshold. The annual tax amount undergoes division by 12 to establish the monthly tax deduction that gets subtracted from gross pay before calculating the net monthly pay. The system function contains payroll calculation operations which ensures correct tax processing for workers who earn different amounts (Cheela et al. 2025). DisplayPayroll() serves as the last function of the payroll system because it shows payroll information to the user. The function operates on employee information and working hours data and monthly selection to determine gross and net pay utilizing the calculateMonthlyPay() function. The system presents all data through a structured format that includes employee ID, name, hourly rate, work hours, monthly gross pay and net pay. Setprecision(2) provides precise two-decimal monetary values for accurate payroll display. The program proceeds through each employee it examines their recorded working hours before generating payroll output. The system's modular structure enables sequential payroll processing of multiple months in a row thus allowing simple growth of the system when handling future payroll periods (Wang & Wang, 2022). The updated payroll system stands out because it can grow according to business needs. The program becomes adaptable for future development because its individual payroll components split into distinct functions. The necessary modifications to tax rules or new payroll components including bonuses or deductions can be applied in the relevant function without affecting other system parts. The business needs stay adaptable because this system architecture approach keeps the payroll functionality flexible for changing requirements. The program structure becomes simpler and easier to test due to functions. Each framework section executes one dedicated operation which enables easy troubleshooting of problems in order to maintain the desired operation of the payroll system (Rahhal et al. 2024). The design of the system also enhances its readability and maintainability as compared to the previous design. Every function has its specified and unique purpose and thus can be easily rewritten or changed. For example in case of new function say, the capability to export payroll data to a file was considered necessary then one may added it as a separate module without having any impact to other modules. In the same manner, if new attributes regarding the new employees or payroll calculations are required, they can be easily incorporated in the functions which are concerned without significantly affecting the program flow. As the starting point for the execution of the payroll process, the main function is the driver which coordinates the software’s functions to prompt employee inputs, calculate working hours, and determine or compute payroll as well as display the outputs.

Employee Data and Hours Worked

Mapping data structures are used in the form of unordered map for case producutor data and hours worked so that there is good search, inserting and searching. The idea of using unordered_map is that it gives the average constant time complexity for any element that will be required to work with potentially big amount of data about employees. The keys of the map are the employee ID, while Employee Name and Hourly Rate in the system are values of the map using a struct called Employee (Singer, 2021). This way the employee information is well filed so that each time there is need to compute the pay roll is easily retrieved. The getEmployeeDetails() function is an important one that will be used to populate the unordered_map with the values of an employee. It declares an unordered_map in which the keys are ids, which are unique numbers for each employee, and the values are Employee. Every Employee object has the information about the employee such as: his name, his hourly rate, etc. The selection of unordered_map is most beneficial because it can manage the employee details using ID, and the system can rapidly access the details when processing payrolls depending on the number of employees in the company data set. For instance if the program requires the name and the hourly rate of an employee for payroll computation the program is able to do this in probably unordered_map through the use of the particular ID of the particular employee. This in turn offers a way to reach the necessary data within a matter of seconds which is particularly useful in the cases when there are a lot of employees (Balogun, 2022).The attributes of the employee data are obtained in the getEmployeeDetails() function and are hardcoded to set the display values with the ID, name, and the hourly rate of the employee. For simplicity, it should be noted that while current implementation has some hardcoded values, in its future versions, they can be substituted by other types of data input, like those from files (CSV, JSON, MS SQL or MySQL). To improve efficiency and for the feasibility of expansion, an unordered_map container is being used for storing information of the employees in a company. Likewise, the getHoursWorked() method is responsible for fetching the hours that have being worked by the employee for a certain month. This function works with a month identifier, such as “Jan25” or “Feb25” and yields the total number of the hours worked within the specified month by each of the employees. Hours worked is also implemented in a similar way as the employee data; therefore, the hours worked are stored in the unordered_map in which the keys are the IDs of the employees, and the values are the number of hours worked. This makes it possible to easily call the hours worked of any employee by typing that particular employee ID without any difficulties. In the cases of hours worked, the use of unordered_map provides the ability to readily access the data for payroll computation. For instance, in a payroll computation where the total amount of work done by an employee in a certain month has to be determined, the work done by that particular employee can be easily obtained right from the system without the need to browse through a list or perform other computation. This is quickly and directly done from the employee ID and the number of hours worked so the system is instant even when sampling data in several employees. Another benefit of using unordered_map for both employee details and the time worked by employees is that the system facilitates the access to both the data at once. In payroll computation, it is possible to line up the employee’s ID with both his/her appropriate hourly rate from the employee details map and his/her hours worked from the hours worked map in constant time (Ponggawa et al. 2024). This makes the payment process fast and efficient thus solving the problem of doing tedious calculations on payroll. In conclusion, the overall usage of unordered_map for storing the employee details and the respective hours worked provides a good structure to contain the data regarding the employees to be used in the computation of payroll. The best feature of this data structure, namely, key-based access allows for handling a huge number of employees and months of data with small assets. It also has the advantage of expandability for the future additions, including the file input or enlarging the base of values, considering more pay factors. Ordering the map for such a system is not necessary since the elements are not meant to be sorted; Rather its efficiency allows it to aptly suit the needs of a simple system like a payroll that requires it to be fast, easily scalable and maintainable.

Figure 2: display Employee payroll details

(Source: Self-created )

Figure 3: Function to calculate the monthly pay and apply tax deduction

(Source: Self-created )

Payroll Calculation and Output

The central function used in calculation of employee’s overall monthly remuneration is the `calculateMonthlyPay()` function for payroll calculation. The first determined figure is the gross pay of the employee in question. This is done by using the formula, employee’s rate per hour × number of hours employed by the employee. This leads to the designation ‘gross, where it refers to the amount of money the employee earns before any subtractions like taxes are made. The tax system applied in the facility works with tax deductions that depends on the revenue made within the year through its employees and their individual annual income. To calculate the tax, the employee’s assessable income is first computed. Annual income is obtained from gross pay by altering it by 12 because the gross pay presumed in the system assumes monthly gross pay (Ariffin et al. 2021). From this annual income, a tax exemption exemption is also subtracted which in this system is set at £12,570 based on the UK tax exemption system. Any income above this ceiling the individual is expected to pay tax at the rate of 20%. If the annual income of an employee is above the exemption limit, then the taxable income is computed by dint of deducting the exemption limit from the annual income and in that total a tax of 20% is charged. Once the tax has been arrived at, it is person’s monthly tax deduction that is calculated by dividing the total tax by twelve months. This is then subtracted from the gross in order to come up with the net pay of the employee, which is the amount that the employee is free to spend after deductions of tax. Payroll tabulation is accomplished by the function `displayPayroll()`, which is meant at displaying the employee’s payroll. This function uses the input entered by the user to display the Employee ID, name, the hourly rate, hours worked, gross pay and the pay after tax has been deduced. It is formatted well and well-printed for clear results in order to give clear payroll information. This function is called for each month so that the payroll data is processed and all the month’s data displayed.

Testing and Results

The concept of testing and validation of the payroll system was aimed at testing the ability of the system to compute the payroll of the employee and the tax deductions depending on the work hours and various other factors related to the income bracket of the employee. Regarding the case “Jan25, the company dealt with two employees with work hours of 160 and 120 respectively.

Figure 4: Output

(Source: Self-created )

This proves that the system can correctly calculate the payroll as a function of rates through the hours worked and taxes which are calculated depending on the annual salary, which in the system is converted to monthly(Abdulkareem and Abboud, 2021). Another wave that was tested was on taxation, excising vigilance to see to it that none of its employees with an earnings level below the tax band for tax exemption of £12,570 had deductions in that regard. The system correctly identified all the tax exempted employees from being taxed and computed their income tax on the basis of the first income tax rate of 20% which was only levied on the income exceeding the exemption limit.

Figure 5: Output

(Source: Self-created )

Moreover testing cases which were characterized by missing values in some of the months like “Feb25” were also conducted. This was achieved without any effect on the system’s functionality of ignoring such incomplete sets of data (Liyana et al. 2024). This feature was significant since it enabled the elimination of wrong conclusions in the payroll since they are based on false records or incomplete information (Calès et al. 2023). The system’s efficiency in employees data storage, different working hours during the months and accurate tax deduction computation were tested with the actual outcomes.

Figure 6: Output

(Source: Self-created )

For instance, when gauging John’s capability the expected total gross pay of £ 1500 prepared for 100 working hours in a pay rate of £15.00 was similar to the output produced by the system. Moreover, test cases included evaluations of two different months, for instance, ‘’Jan25” and ‘’Feb25.’’

Figure 7: Output

(Source: Self-created )

It tested payroll outputs for each month when it was necessary to change the hours worked by an employee from one stretched month to the other (Adoghe, 2023). It was also possible to use the system in handling all forms of employees, such as tax-exempt employees and no data situation. To do so, the tests ascertained that the payroll system produces a realistic payroll report, tax exemptions and tax deductions as well as handling of other non standard entries.

Figure 8: Output

It also computed the monthly gross pay for the hours worked, which were John Anderson £15.50 per hour and Sarah Bennett £20 per hour. For example, before tax, John was paid £2480 per month, and his amount after tax of his annual income would be £2193.50. Also in the case of Sarah, her gross pay before tax used to by £2400 and her take home pay that was paid after tax was £2129.50.

(Source: Self-created)

Figure 9: Output

(Source: Self-created )

Challenges and Solutions

Among all these traits, one of the most challenging aspects that were experienced in developing the payroll system was file handling, especially when it came to inputting data from other files (Loganathan, 2021). The initial one involved raw data inclusion directly into the code; thus, to improve the approach, the system had to take data about the employees and the hours they worked from different files. Problems occurred with lack or improper format of providing files which leads to sudden failure of program or program’s behaving abnormally.

Figure 10: Output

(Source: Self-created )

Thus, to rectify this, some error control measures were incorporated concerning the availability of files before they are opened for reading. Should the case be that a file is missing or corrupted, the program will return an error message and terminate the process so that invalid input is not passed to the payroll generation process. Other issues included data integrity such as situations where data required was inconsistent on the employees. For instance, one has arising from `employee details file’ not tallying with `hours worked file,’ where the two consist of a different number of employees. To do this, the system was programmed to check the IDs to make sure all the hours the employee clocked in could be classified under the right and corresponding employee details (Lohan and Narang, 2024). Other issues which were considered as emergent subproblems included cases where there are no complete pay data or rounding off of tax figures. The system was developed to incorporate missing hours by excluding the payroll computations of such employees and simultaneously raising any vulnerabilities as well. To reduce round off mistakes for taxes, it flows a policy of rounding to the second decimal place for all the financial computations.

Figure 11: Output

(Source: Self-created )

Conclusion

In this project it worked on the development of a payroll system where it established how to calculate the employees monthly pay to the gross pay, the taxes that would be deducted and the remaining net pay after tax. The system also has modularity in terms of functions that help to retrieve desired employee details and hours worked, calculate monthly pay and display the results. The function of utilizing the unordered_map is practical for efficiently storing all the necessary information of the employees, whereas, the payroll functionalities include certain tax exemptions and deductions. Several new cases were run in the course of the test, including forgetting some details and various occurrences of various employees working different times which shows how the system worked in producing proper payroll. Overall, the main issues concerned input/output of the file for the implementation of employee and pay data stocking as well as the issue of errors in data. Here two major considerations were made during the development, one was to address error handling and the other was the data validation of the input files and the employee records. The process was quite beneficial whereby they got an opportunity to solve practical problems such as tax computations, exception handling, and modularity. This means that in the future improvement of the system, the file input/output can be incorporated so that the user can open new employee and payroll data files to upload into the system. Additional protection improvements can be made to cater for the issues caused by the missing and erroneous information. Also, the implementation of Object Oriented Programming (OOP) is another advantage of the system since it would make it easier to extend the current features of the system and to integrate with other systems.

This C++ payroll system assignment sample helps students understand how to design, implement, and test a real-world payroll application using modular programming and data structures. If you are struggling with C++ logic, file handling, tax calculations, system documentation, or meeting coursework requirements, assignment help online can make the process easier. Our experts provide guided support for programming assignments, project reports, debugging, and academic formatting, ensuring your submission is accurate, well-structured, and university-ready.

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